Old Skool and New Media: Distributing your poetry at the millennium

(This article was commissioned by the poetry page at About.com, as a sort of primer to the worlds of both traditional self-distribution and electronic distribution. I hope you find it useful.)

One of the truly great things about being a writer in this modern age is the opportunity to present your work directly to your audience, without the necessity of middlemen. Gone are the days when poets would sit with baited breath while the cultural elite - gatekeepers of the holy academic journals and smartass urban rags worldwide - sat in their ivory towers and single-handedly decided which contemporary writers were "worthy" enough to be introduced to a mass audience.

Today writers regularly sell up to 10,000 copies of their work armed with nothing but a pair of scissors, a well-worn glue stick and a shoplift-happy friend working the night shift at the local Kinko's. Add a thousand bucks and a basic understanding of Quark XPress, and you have a book virtually indistinguishable from the latest release by Simon and Shuster. Add a knowledge of HTML and a free Geocities web page and you have a virtual empire, disseminating your work to millions of literature-hungry readers around the world.

But even with the ease of production in our contemporary times, a question still often comes up which stops many self-publishing writers from achieving their true potential - namely, how do you take your zines, your chapbooks, your Microsoft Word documents, and actually get them into the hands of your audience? The question becomes one not of self-publishing but self-distributing, a part of the process equally important but sadly overlooked by many in the underground literary scene.

Barring the opportunity to sell your work at live shows, on tour and out of your backpack (the power of which, incidentally, should not be overlooked...but that's a whole other article), and with the assumption that most people reading this online article are already familiar with the benefits of owning one's own website, I would like to focus on two means of distributing your homemade product directly to the masses. One is decidedly old-skool and has been around for decades, although it's no less important now than it was then. The other is pointedly new-media and takes advantage of the latest technological breakthroughs. Both have the power to radically expand the amount of people reading and buying your work.

How it works

Always query the bookstore first! The store in question may not carry the type of material you write, or their store may be currently overstocked, or hell, they may be closed altogether. Write them a letter or email, explaining who you are and what kind of publication you're selling. If they ask, or if you're just feeling adventurous, mail them a sample copy. Most US packages consisting of one chapbook and a cover letter in a 6 x 9 envelope cost 55 cents to mail, but check with your local post office to make sure. Also don't forget that any US package weighing over one pound must now first be inspected by a postal carrier before it can be sealed and delivered, because of the threat of letter bombs.

Keep a tab of which stores are carrying your book, how many copies they have, and what date you sent them. 95 percent of these stores work on what's called a "consignment" basis - in other words, instead of purchasing your books outright they agree instead to carry them for free and send you the profits each time one is sold. The standard consignment ratio in the US is 40/60, meaning that for every $5 book they sell you receive $3 and they keep $2 for their time and effort. (Better and worse ratios are not unheard of, but be wary of any place that asks for more than 50 percent of the gross sales.) It's not unusual for stores to hold onto the slow profits of your sales and to mail them to you in bulk every three or four months; you're certainly within your rights, however, to occasionally send a short letter once every month or so, checking in on the book and seeing if they need any more copies. These stores are run by people like you and me, so always be patient and polite when corresponding with them.

How does this work out financially? Let's take a recent example from my own life. My newest chapbook costs approximately a dollar apiece at the local copy shop. Envelopes are about a nickel apiece when bought in bulk, and a recent shipment of ten books cost me three dollars in postage, or roughly thirty cents per book. This means that my total cost per book is $1.35, and I'm receiving $3.00 in gross profit from each sale. It's a gain of over 200 percent, which isn't bad for a book being xeroxed by hand at two in the morning at Kinko's.

(Incidentally, this entire process can be duplicated while using a legitimate basement-press distributor, like the excellent Last Gasp in San Francisco. A place like Last Gasp basically takes care of the actual dissemination of the physical book for you - you mail them a bunch of copies at once, and they hold on to them in a big warehouse and mail them out slowly each time a bookstore puts in an order. I am a big fan of such distributors and whole-heartedly recommend them when you have a large amount of product to move, 1,000 copies or more. In the case of chapbooks, however, where sales goals are small and you might only be selling through 10 or 20 stores total, it makes more sense to distribute yourself. Legitimate distributors make their money by keeping yet another 20 percent of your gross sales, meaning that you're now receiving 40 percent of the cover price, not 60. This is fine when running a larger print job, where the price per book is dramatically lower, but can really add up when you're going through a relatively expensive process like on-demand xeroxing.)

Benefits and Drawbacks

The obvious benefit from self-distributing your chapbook is that these stores exist in places where you don't. In many cases, the casual and friendly atmosphere of these particular stores can serve as a "personal promoter" of your work, a place open all day, every day, whose employees are personally recommending your work to their customers because they themselves are fans. Distributing to a wide range of stores can lay an excellent foundation for a future tour, virtually guaranteeing spaces all the way across the country and Canada who will host readings and signings for you, oftentimes also resulting in free couches in which to sleep, free meals and free liquor. (For more on the benefits of underground touring, see the excellent "Sofasurfing" by Juliette Torrez [Manic D Press].)

Don't discount the amount of money one can make on an endeavor like this as well. Sales of simply 500 chapbooks is enough to buy you a new computer. Even 50 sales is often enough to fund an out-of-town weekend vacation. No one is ever going to get rich selling chapbooks, but the possibility is very real of turning a nice little profit. Not to mention, your work is being read and enjoyed all across the country. You suddenly have single-handedly created a national literary reputation for yourself. Enjoy it.

The biggest drawback, of course, is that you're sharing almost half of your profit with another entity. Sales of chapbooks through live shows result in you putting five bucks in cash in your pocket, which is just not how the world works when another venue is selling them for you. Also, be warned that the process of self-distributing is a long, detail-heavy one. The fun, creative process of actually writing the book is now over, and the relative drudgery of administrative work now lies ahead. 95 percent of your success as a self-distributor relies on your willingness to lick stamps every single night, address envelopes, maintain a comprehensive and timely database, visit the post office once a week, and research the web for bookstores and reviewers on a regular basis. No one ever said that publishing was glamorous - ask anyone who's ever worked for a small press.

(A good place to start your search on the web is at the American Booksellers Association homepage, which maintains a free online database of all their members' stores, and search engines such as "Yahoo" and "Google." You can either scan their existing lists of bookstores or run special searches along the lines of "Austin+alternative+literature+bookstores.")

Electronic Books

The promise (or threat, depending on how you look at it) concerning literature on the Internet in the last several years has centered around the idea of "electronic books," actual literary collections that are presented, sold, bought and traded on the web in digital form. While the technology for presenting the texts themselves has been steadily improving, a realistic form of actually taking the "e-books" and reading them on the go has sadly never quite come to fruition.

But in the rapidly changing culture we live in, these options are expanding on a monthly basis. Palm Pilots, for example, once the exclusive domain of overpaid yuppies with too much time on their hands, have suddenly become egalitarian with the recent slash in prices. (Now that 3Com is pushing the new "wireless Internet" Palm VII, brand-new Palm III's are going for $150 until they can get rid of them all. And hell, even artists can afford that.) As portable devices such as these and the myriad of Windows CE-compatible machines start slowly making their way into the general public's hands, more and more discussion has been arising over the very real dissemination of literature in electronic form.

There are currently two realistic ways of presenting your poetry in electronic form, for contemplation and enjoyment on handheld devices. Both have their individual benefits and drawbacks, and the two work in radically different ways not only from traditional paper books from each other as well.

E-books

The most common way currently for writers to present their work electronically is to take the entire document and convert it to a portable-friendly format. In the case of Palms (a personal bias of mine, in that I own one), this means presenting your document in a format entitled ".prc." You can think of .prc as a portable version of ".txt," or the ASCII-friendly, non-formatted version of typed documents. Both the .prc and .txt versions of literary documents are elegantly applicable over a wide range of devices - by eschewing such proprietary settings as italics, tables and margins, the documents become universally acceptable on devices ranging from a $5,000 screaming-fast PC all the way to a beat-up Macintosh Classic you picked up for five bucks at the Salvation Army. (The admirable Project Gutenberg, for example, whose goal is no less than the electronic offering of every public-domain book ever written in human history, works exclusively in ".txt" format.)

AvantGo

AvantGo is one of a number of new sites dedicated to providing actual web content to handheld devices. How it works is that people become free "subscribers" to the service, receiving a piece of proprietary software that runs on their desktop. AvantGo keeps a list of several thousand "channels," which are in actuality Palm and CE-friendly versions of such popular websites as Salon, the New York Times, MapQuest and the like. After choosing which channels a subscriber would like to receive (again for free), each portable synchronization with their desktop computer will launch that proprietary software. The software connects to the AvantGo server through your normal desktop Internet connection, which will then go to the website in question, suck in the information, and push it back through to your portable device. You unhook your Palm, stick it in your pocket, and suddenly have anywhere from 10 to 200 pages of web content ready to read no matter where you go. (The Palm VII version of this software is even more impressive, allowing Palm owners to literally have live web access on a 24/7 basis.)

The catch to AvantGo, and the thing that many writers don't realize, is that becoming an official "channel" with the site is free and easy to do. AvantGo makes their money from selling advertising, so they are more than happy to add any person who wishes to take the time to program a regularly-updated Palm-friendly version of their website. This includes myself, and the Palm-friendly version of my site is officially going "live" the same day I'm writing this article.

How it works

In the case of e-books, numerous programs exist all over the web for converting your existing documents into .prc form. Some are free while others cost a minimum amount; some are very good while others are not quite so hot; some are stand-alone programs that do nothing but the conversion, while others are in actuality macros that work with existing applications like Word and WordPerfect. To find the wide range of programs available, it is easiest to go to freeware-heavy places such as Palm's own support site, which usually put all the converter information together on one page along with customer comments and the record of downloads. You can also have luck by going to a search engine and typing in such terms as "prc," "doc to prc," "text to prc," "electronic text," "e-book creation," and the like. Once you convert the e-book you'd like people to read, there are several places in which to offer the book itself. You can leave the book on your personal website, with a link to it from one of your pages. (Like any other non-HTML document at a website, clicking on the link will signal to that person's computer to download the document to the hard drive. PDA owners then transfer the book to their Palm or other device themselves, an easy process.) You can also offer the book at the same freeware websites where you found the converter in the first place - many of these places have entire sections devoted to electronic books, and the number of amateur writers at these places is sometimes astounding. Other options include selling the e-book through a legitimate web retailer, converting the first chapter of a paper book as a "teaser" to get people to purchase, or starting your own online literary journal devoted to the collection of e-books worldwide.

Becoming a channel with AvantGo is an easy but long process. Go to their website and look at the information about becoming a content partner. The entire process is free and the staff of AvantGo has been nothing but helpful to me, but I can't make any personal guarantee that they will accept your channel proposal. As far as actually programming the pages that will be loaded to people's devices each day, the process is remarkably simple and can be executed by any person with even a minimum knowledge of HTML. (AvantGo provides their own well-written and extremely useful development guide at their site, which walks you through the entire process of creating your own PDA-friendly space...or as I've been calling them, "Palmsites.") The only technical requirement is that the pages actually sit on a web server somewhere on the Internet, just like any other website that exists. There are dozens of places around the web that provide free server space for users; look casually through search engines for more details.

Benefits and Drawbacks

The biggest benefit to both e-books and AvantGo, in my opinion, is that there is a literal untapped audience right now. When I go live with my AvantGo channel, I will literally be the only writer on the entire planet offering my creative work to the millions of dedicated subscribers of the service. Oftentimes at freeware sites there will be only five to ten actual contemporary works being offered electronically, the rest consisting of public domain stories such as the Bible and the work of Mark Twain. As portable devices become even cheaper over time and their use more prevalent across social and financial spheres, this topic will become of even greater relevance. Why not get in on the ground floor now, when you have little to no competition for audience members? It's as if you had started a website in 1991 - your readers are captive because they literally have no one else to read.

Both processes also exist as a way of disseminating your product at almost no cost whatsoever. While xeroxing and mailing my chapbooks cost $1.35 per reader, my e-books can be downloaded and read by 50,000, 100,000, a million people at absolutely no cost to me - I receive my web space for free from Geocities, my Internet access for free through work, and the converter was a piece of freeware I downloaded one day. The Internet presents a truly profound opportunity for artists - a chance to provide your work to a global audience, no matter how poor you are personally, in a format that looks just as professional no matter if it's you or a team of 100 staff members at HarperCollins presenting it.

The biggest drawback can be potentially trivial or life-threatening, depending on what kind of person you are. The basic gist is that you're not receiving any direct money in exchange for readership. This can be looked at one of two ways: you can either trust in the idea of a free-market society and realize that unpaid electronic access to your work will do nothing but help sales of the paper versions; or you can be wary of a free-market society and legitimately worry that people will not buy your work when they can receive it for free on the web. I personally think both opinions are valid ones to have, although admittedly the mere authorship of this article probably gives away my personal thoughts on the matter.

Conclusion

It's a mistake, I think, to discount either the old or the new ways of presenting your work directly to your audience. Both processes have their own individual charms, and in conjunction can provide a truly powerful way for you to release your literary collections to the public at large. This article, of course, is not nearly the final word on the subject of self-distribution. I encourage readers to send their own tips, advice, and good/bad stories about the process to About.com. Also, feel free to write to me personally if you are a self-distributor and would like to exchange research concerning zine-friendly stores. I'm not just a journalist but a self-publisher myself, and I can use the information just as much as anyone else.

Copyright 2000, Jason Pettus. All rights reserved.